A new scientific study has found significant effects of open-world gaming on people’s quality of life and emotional well-being. It also shows that playing games in tandem with watching nostalgia-inducing movies like Studio Ghibli’s films can have an even bigger effect, indicating that different types of media can interact with each other.
Writing in the journal JMIR Serious Games, which focuses on games studies research, a team of scientists presents evidence that playing The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild can have a range of positive outcomes. Testing with a sample of postgraduate students–a community famous for its high levels of anxiety, dissatisfaction, and burnout–the authors show that playing Breath of the Wild on its own can help spark a sense of purpose and meaning. Further, this game helped people feel more calm, more adventurous, and more skillful in their lives outside of the game context.
Investigating potential interactions between games and watching film, the authors also instruct a subset of participants to play Breath of the Wild and watch a clip from Studio Ghibli’s My Neighbor Totoro or Kiki’s Delivery Service in close succession. Theorizing that the film clips spark a positive sense of nostalgia among participants, the authors find an even stronger effect on overall happiness and life purpose among this subset.
Minesto, a marine energy technology developer based in Sweden, is a winner of the 2025 Gizmodo Science Fair for deploying the first operational, megawatt-scale tidal energy kite in the Faroe Islands.
The question
Can we use an underwater “kite” to turn ocean tides into renewable energy?
The results
In February 2024, Minesto’s Dragon 12 tidal energy kite delivered its first electricity to the national grid in the Faroe Islands. This 40-foot-wide (12-meter-wide), 28-ton subsea powerplant is the largest and latest of three tidal energy kites Minesto has installed in the Faroe Islands since 2020. This one generates far more electricity.
Dragon 12 is called a kite because it produces electricity by “flying” underwater while tethered to the ocean floor, but it looks more like a small plane. Its wing uses hydrodynamic lift to move the kite while an onboard control system steers it in a figure-8 pattern. As it flies, a turbine shaft located at the rear of the kite turns a generator. Clean energy then travels through a cable inside the tether to a seabed umbilical, which transmits power to the onshore grid.
The figure-8 path allows Dragon 12 to accelerate faster than the current flowing past it, reducing the size of the kite and rotor necessary to generate power. Indeed, Dragon 12 is up to 15 times lighter per megawatt than other similar technologies, according to Minesto. Its design also maximizes energy production, allowing the turbine to operate in flow conditions as low as 3.9 feet per second (1.2 meters per second).
Dragon 12 produces power automatically and autonomously, Minesto’s Chief Technology Officer Bernt Erik Westre explained. Once the kite’s onboard sensors detect that flow conditions are conducive to energy generation, it’s off to the races. “We just tell the system to fly, and then it will decide whether conditions are okay to fly in, and it will start,” Westre told Gizmodo. “If they’re not anymore, it will stop.”
In the Faroe Islands, Dragon 12 operates at a depth of 164 feet (50 meters). Minesto’s tidal energy kites “cannot ever get to the surface, unless we detach them with a special tool,” Westre said. Unlike fixed-bottom wind turbines, tidal energy kites are invisible from the shoreline, and ships can safely sail over them. This, coupled with the fact that these power plants can operate in low-flow conditions, opens up a much larger marine renewable energy market, Westre explained.
Within the first two weeks of testing in the Faroe Islands, Minesto verified Dragon 12’s functionality and power production performance. The kite has been delivering clean energy to the national grid ever since, with a 25% increase in power output after Minesto lengthened its tether in May.
“If you want lightweight, renewable energy that’s invisible, you know who to call,” Westre said.
Why they did it
Before joining Minesto in 2016, Westre was working as a naval architect for the oil industry. Ultimately though, the impact this industry was having on the global climate and wealth disparity became too stark to ignore. Westre wanted to be a part of the solution, not the problem.
“I guess I came to a point where I wanted to be able to look my children—and eventually grandchildren, if I ever get any—in the eye and say, ‘I made a shot at it,’” he said. Plus, “We were making the world’s richest companies even richer, and that didn’t feel right anymore.”
Minesto, founded in 2007, doesn’t just aim to reduce the world’s reliance on fossil fuels. The company’s offbeat approach to commercial marine power production aims to maximize the amount of electricity people can harness from the ocean. Its tidal energy kites do this by operating across a wider range of conditions than traditional technologies. This, Westre hopes, will open up a vast, untapped market for tidal energy extraction.
Why they’re a winner
Minesto is developing a new class of megawatt-scale renewable energy technology that produces predictable, clean power in untapped parts of the ocean. While it isn’t the only company working toward this goal, its technology comes with several advantages. The main selling point is its ability to efficiently generate power in low-flow conditions.
“The [design] principle has been the same since 2007, which is to fly or move the turbine rather than keep it stationary underwater,” Westre said. “By doing it that way, the market—or global potential—is so much larger.”
Stationary systems—such as fixed-bottom tidal turbines—could theoretically operate in low-flow conditions too, but they would have to be huge, he explained. The fact that Minesto’s tidal energy kites move allows them to harness energy from slower currents while reducing cost and consumption of materials.
Another key advantage of this system is that it operates completely below the surface with minimal impact on marine wildlife. This avoids visual pollution that can negatively impact tourism and discourage public support for renewable energy projects.
What’s next
Minesto made big strides toward commercialization in 2024. As it continues building out its tidal energy provisions in the Faroe Islands, it’s working towards installing a first-of-its-kind tidal energy array with multiple Dragon 12 kites. The first phase will have a capacity of 10 megawatts—an initial step towards its eventual 200-megawatt capacity.
“10 megawatts on the Faroe Islands will make a difference,” Westre said. Once the array reaches its full capacity, it could meet 40% of the Faroe Islands’ expected electricity needs in 2030, according to Minesto partner Svenska Kullager Fabriken, a Swedish bearing company.
In June, the Swedish Energy Agency awarded Miensto and its partners $2.6 million to build a complete microgrid installation in the Faroe Islands. That project is expected to be complete by 2026.
The team
Minesto is led by CEO Martin Edlund, CTO Bernt Erik Westre, and COO Johannes Hüffmeier.
Click here to see all of the winners of the 2025 Gizmodo Science Fair.
The ALICE Collaboration is a winner of the 2025 Gizmodo Science Fair for transforming lead into gold for a fraction of a second and exposing the strange physics that goes on inside the Large Hadron Collider.
The question
What byproducts does ALICE—the Large Ion Collider Experiment at CERN—produce when it studies matter at extreme energy levels?
The result
Many different things, but perhaps most interesting of all—gold!
In a Physical Review C paper published earlier this year, the ALICE Collaboration announced that between 2015 and 2018, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) created around 86 billion gold nuclei, each lasting for about a microsecond.
ALICE primarily studies high-energy collisions between lead nuclei, whose charge is 82 times that of a proton. These large nuclei travel nearly at the speed of light in the Large Hadron Collider, which slams these particles into the ALICE detector. These collisions produce a pulse of photon energy that chips away bits of the nuclei—usually neutrons, but sometimes protons. When a lead nucleus loses three protons, it transmutes into element number 79, or gold.
A visualization of lead-lead collisions at the Large Hadron Collider, recorded by ALICE. Credit: CERN/ALICE Collaboration
This transmutation occurs around 50,000 to 80,000 times per second. Indeed, the program’s “gold production is quite copious,” said John Jowett, an accelerator physicist at CERN. “However, on a human scale the gold production is very small. [Until] now we’ve only created about, I think, 90 picograms, which is one millionth of a gram of gold.”
Those 90 picograms of gold disappear almost immediately after emerging, he added. “So this just reminds us—I like to say to people—how small atoms are compared to the scales we’re used to,” he said.
Why they did it
The result didn’t surprise any CERN scientist familiar with these instruments, Jowett said. “We didn’t talk about it much before, but we knew it should happen.”
Scientists were also aware that this process had serious implications for ALICE in general, according to Daniel Tapia Takaki, a physicist at the University of Kansas who led the CERN working groups for this project. Any particle that transmutes at CERN typically travels very long distances, meaning some inevitably smash into different sections of the LHC tunnel.
“So they basically become kind of a safety hazard—I mean, they at least start switching off the alarms,” said Tapia Takaki. “You want to have a collider that’s very stable… So understanding exactly how to mitigate this transmutation is one of the big priorities for the next generation of colliders.”
The beam pipes inside ALICE. Credit: CERN/ALICE Collaboration
Uliana Dmitrieva is the ambitious young scientist who kicked off a project to officially record this process in a formal, scientific manner. The task proved so gargantuan that by the time the paper made headlines, Dmitrieva, who had proposed the project as a master’s student, had already finished her PhD and was preparing to become a staff scientist at Italy’s National Institute of Nuclear Physics.
“It took more time than my PhD thesis,” she laughed. “There were very few [formal] analyses of [these processes], and actually, I had to do everything from scratch, because it was difficult to model. There were a lot of bugs in [the calculations] because nobody had checked this before.”
Why they’re a winner
All that strain proved more than worth the effort—but in ways the team never imagined. The public attention for this project somewhat disguises the fact that gold production is “just a small part of the paper; the paper was mostly about proton emission and lead collisions due to these so-called ultra-peripheral interactions,” Jowett noted.
“It was…strange, because, okay, we just measured protons—nothing interesting—why is it everywhere?” Dmitrieva joked. “It sounds really funny that there’s some kind of alchemy at the LHC.”
But the team decided to lean into this angle, which clearly “caught the imagination of the public, and we thought it was a nice way to explain some of this physics,” Jowett added. Overall, they were pleasantly surprised to see their project become an entry point to the grand scientific enterprise at CERN.
“It made us happy but also humbled,” Tapia Takaki said. “We have a responsibility to share the knowledge and the excitement—and certainly, [creating gold] is very exciting.”
What’s next
Now that the public excitement has cooled down, the researchers are looking to build on this data to further improve the detectors. That said, and given the large size of the project, there isn’t a single, consolidated plan for the collaboration as a whole.
Tapia Takaki wants to boost the collaboration’s ability to make precise, systematic measurements of proton and neutron emission. With these results, he hopes ALICE’s quirky particle physics can help tackle the most pressing questions in quantum mechanics.
Jowett, who retired in 2019, now advises younger physicists, including at the ALICE Collaboration. “There’s a lot of research going on at the LHC,” he said. “It’s a very broadband machine that studies many things—ALICE is just one part of it. This has given a few surprises. And I think it will continue to do so.”
The team
To say that ALICE is a big collaboration would be a tremendous understatement. With 1,886 members across 163 institutions in 39 countries, it takes a veritable city of scientists to turn lead into gold. A full list of ALICE Collaboration members can be found here.
Click here to see all of the winners of the 2025 Gizmodo Science Fair.
Listening to music is a regular part of many people’s day, but what music you find yourself gravitating towards may have more to do with your age than you think. A new study, presented at the Association for Computing Machinery conference, revealed that our relationship with music shifts dramatically as we get older.
The study analyzed an enormous dataset from the music-sharing service Last.fm, which allows users to link popular streaming apps like Spotify and track their listening habits. Researchers looked at over 40,000 individuals’ listening history over a 15-year period and were able to map how musical tastes evolve across one’s lifetime.
“When you’re young, you want to experience everything. You don’t go to a music festival just to listen to one particular band, but when you become an adult, you’ve usually found a style of music that you identify with. The charts become less important,” said Alan Said, associate professor of computer science at the University of Gothenburg, in a press release.
The findings confirm something many of us already suspect. When we’re young, our relationship to music is social and driven by trends. Teenagers and young adults consume a wide variety of genres, chase the latest hits, and bond with friends over shared playlists.
However, the transition into adulthood marks a turning point in listening habits. For those in their 20s and 30s, playlists diversified even further with many people experimenting across genres and artists. But as the years pass, that musical experimentation begins to dwindle.
By middle age, nostalgia begins to play a more important role in the music people listen to. Songs that remind us of our youth become the soundtrack of later stages of life and help ground us in those associated memories.
All of this doesn’t mean that older adults stop engaging with new music altogether. Instead, they develop a pattern of both returning to those youthful classics and occasionally branching out into new musical territory. As people age, their music taste becomes more uniquely theirs, and it becomes more difficult to find any overlap between people’s favorite songs and bands.
How Science Can Help Music Streaming
For streaming giants like Spotify and Apple Music, these findings could have implications for the way they recommend music in the future. Recommendation systems rely heavily on algorithms designed to anticipate user preferences. But if listening habits shift so dramatically over one’s lifetime, those algorithms may not be able to keep up.
“A service that recommends the same type of music in the same way to everyone risks missing what different groups actually want,” remarked Said in the press release. “Younger listeners may benefit from recommendations that mix the latest hits with suggestions for older music they have not yet discovered. Middle-aged listeners appreciate a balance between new and familiar, while older listeners want more tailored recommendations that reflect their personal tastes and nostalgic reminiscences.”
Overall, this study highlights how music isn’t just entertainment, but is a part of our shifting identity. Our playlists evolve as we do, reflecting the cultural trends we grew up with, the personal experiences that shaped us, and the nostalgia that comforts us later in life.
Our writers at Discovermagazine.com use peer-reviewed studies and high-quality sources for our articles, and our editors review for scientific accuracy and editorial standards. Review the sources used below for this article:
An Air India flight from Ahmedabad bound for London spent just 30 seconds in the air before disaster struck earlier this year. Preliminary reports indicate that the aircraft’s fuel control switches were inexplicably turned off shortly after takeoff, cutting fuel to the engines and causing total power loss. Frantic cockpit recordings reveal the two pilots questioning each other in confusion over who made the fatal decision. Amid the chaos, the plane plummeted and crash-landed, killing all but one person on board. It was the deadliest aviation disaster in a decade.
A pair of aviation engineers from the Birla Institute of Technology and Science in India believe they have developed a design that could help prevent similar crashes—a design that involves massive, AI-controlled external airbags. Called Project REBIRTH, the multi-layered safety system would retrofit aircraft with a suite of sensors that constantly monitor flight conditions. If the system determines a crash below 3,000 feet is unavoidable, giant airbags would deploy, forming a protective cocoon designed to absorb impact energy and reduce damage. An infrared beacon and flashing lights would also be activated during the crash with the goal of making the cushioned wreckage easier for emergency responders to locate.
An AI system would detect potential failures and deploy airbags that form protective cocoon. Image: Eshel Wasim and Dharsan Srinivasan / Project REBIRTH
The engineers are calling their design, which is nominated for 2025 James Dyson Award, the world’s first “AI-powered crash survival system.” Though still in its early testing phases, they say computer simulations show the system can reduce crash forces by more than 60 percent. In theory, a softer landing, combined with faster, AI-driven emergency response decisions, could mean the difference between passengers surviving or dying in a crash. An aviation expert speaking with Popular Science said the concept shows promise but cautioned that many unanswered questions remain, particularly regarding the added weight of the airbags.
“This sounds like an interesting idea BUT airline disasters that this airbag system is intended to mitigate would mean that future aircraft would all be carrying the additional weight and other compromises to mitigate one accident in 20 years,” Jeff Edwards, a retired US Navy 1-6 Intruder bombardier and founder of aviation safety consulting firm AVSafe, told Popular Science.
REBIRTH emerged as a “response to grief”
Eshel Wasim and Dharsan Srinivasan, the brains behind REBIRTH, say the concept was a direct response to the Air India crash, which left them and their family members reeling.
“My mother couldn’t sleep,” Wasim writes. “She kept thinking about the fear the passengers and pilots must have felt, knowing there was no way out. That helplessness haunted us.”
The pair began scouring academic research on airline safety measures and discovered a notable gap. Most air safety systems are designed to prevent crashes, with comparatively little focus on improving survivability when a crash is unavoidable. With that in mind, they set out to develop a method targeting three specific goals: slowing an aircraft before impact, absorbing the force of the crash, and helping rescuers locate and respond to the site more quickly.
“REBIRTH is more than engineering—it’s a response to grief,” the engineers write. “A promise that survival can be planned, and that even after failure, there can be a second chance.”
Using AI, giant airbags, and reverse thrusters to make crashes safer
REBIRTH, as a system, begins working long before the popcorn-shaped airbags deploy. Sensors distributed throughout the aircraft monitor altitude, speed, engine status, direction, and pilot response. These sensors relay data to an onboard AI system, which analyzes the information to determine whether a crash appears imminent. If the system makes that determination at or below 3,000 feet, it triggers airbag deployment. The engineers note that pilots have a brief window to override the AI’s deployment decision, though it’s unclear exactly how long that window lasts.
If a pilot override doesn’t occur, massive airbags deploy from the nose, belly, and tail of the aircraft. All of that should happen in under two seconds. The so-called “smart airbags” are constructed from layers of Kevlar, TPU, Zylon, and STF, materials specifically selected for their energy-absorbing properties. These fabric layers are reinforced by an inner lining of various “non-Newtonian fluids” (liquids that don’t have a constant viscosity), which help further absorb impact. Assuming the engines are still functional, they will also automatically engage in reverse thrust to help slow the aircraft. According to the engineers, this reverse thrust alone could reduce the plane’s speed before impact by anywhere from 8 to 20 percent.
Once the airbag covered plane makes impact, the system would then automatically shoot out infrared beacon, GPS coordinates, and lights to help first responders quickly identify it.
“It prepares for the worst when all else fails,” the engineers write.
So far, Wasim and Srinivasan say they’ve seen promising results from computer simulations of their system. They have also built a 1:12 scale prototype and have begun reaching out to policymakers, aircraft manufacturers, and government agencies to initiate larger-scale, real-world testing. In theory, they believe the system could be retrofitted onto various types of aircraft, both new and old.
“Today, REBIRTH is ready for scaled testing, with schematics, simulations, and materials data prepared,” they write.
Can massive airbags make plane crashes safer? Aviation experts have their doubts. Image: Eshel Wasim and Dharsan Srinivasan / Project REBIRTH
Overly heavy airbags could do might do more harm than good
Edwards, the aviation expert from AVSafe, said more testing data is needed before the viability of the airbag system can be determined. The system’s actual effectiveness, he noted, may partly depend on its overall weight. Although the airbags and thrusters are intended to reduce the force of impact, that benefit could be offset if the system is so heavy that it adds significant weight and drag. The airbags themselves would also need to be enormous to meaningfully reduce the impact forces of a commercial aircraft weighing over 600,000 pounds.
“The weight penalty alone would be a major concern,” Edwards said.
There’s also still some uncertainty about the overall effectiveness of the AI monitoring system as proposed. While AI could sense the plane’s proximity to the ground and make a decision to deploy safety measures, Edwards said there are still many other real-time variables that need to be factored in when making an off-airport landing.
Parachutes, ‘magic skin’ and trap door: the whacky world of plane safety ideas
REBIRTH follows a long line of eye-catchingly ambitious air safety proposals, many of which never end up seeing the light of day. Some smaller twin-engine planes are already capable of deploying large “whole airplane” parachutes designed to help an aircraft descend safely in the event of engine failure. Back in 2011, researchers backed by NASA funding explored the development of so-called self-healing “magic skin” for aircraft that could shield the exterior from lightning, extreme temperatures, and electromagnetic interference. The process involved coating planes with a conductive film and energy-absorbing foam. They also explored ways for the coating to repair itself if punctured or torn.
Other proposed safety measures have been notably less high-tech. Following the September 11 terrorist attacks, Airbus filed a patent for a trapdoor installed at the cockpit entrance, apparently designed to eject a would-be attacker from the aircraft midair. The same patent even proposed deploying tranquilizer gas in the cabin as an anti-terrorism measure. As far as we can tell, neither of these concepts ever made it into commercial aircraft.
If REBIRTH does end up winning the Dyson award when it’s announced on November 5, it will join a cadre of out-of-the-box proposals. Past winners of the award include a team that created an off-road trailer used to transport wounded soldiers in Ukraine, a biomedical wearable glove used to test for glaucoma, and an “E-coating” made of waste glass used to reduce the heat absorption of buildings. Winners of the award receive $40,000 in prize money.
Current laptops with Intel Core Ultra Series 2 processors rely on a hybrid chip design that is specifically geared towards energy efficiency. The Neural Processing Unit (NPU), used for the first time in consumer systems, plays a central role here. This dedicated computing unit for AI tasks relieves the CPU and GPU of inference-based processes such as image recognition, language processing, or modelling.
While the CPU had to take on many of these tasks in conventional systems, the NPU enables a significantly more differentiated load distribution. This lowers the average system load and noticeably reduces energy requirements. As many NPU calculations can be carried out at a low clock frequency and in parallel, the energy balance is significantly improved compared to purely CPU- or GPU-based architectures.
Energy-saving components in Intel Core Ultra
The Intel Core Ultra V models in particular combine four performance cores with four efficiency cores and a dedicated NPU to form a tiered computing unit. The P-cores take over performance-critical tasks, while the E-cores and NPU remain continuously active in the background and run routine processes and AI functions with low power requirements.
Mark Hachman / IDG
The integrated Intel Arc Graphics also plays a role in this context: it enables hardware-accelerated video decoding and graphics-intensive display without an additional dedicated GPU, which relieves the cooling system and reduces the overall power consumption. The NPU delivers up to 48 TOPS of computing power with minimal power consumption. This benefits AI applications and AI functions as well as users, as the energy requirements of notebooks can be significantly minimised.
Intel
Microsoft’s energy-saving mechanisms under Windows 11
Parallel to the hardware platform, new energy-saving strategies have been implemented with Windows 11. The “User Interaction-Aware CPU Power Management” analyzes user activity in real time. If no interaction via keyboard, mouse, or touchpad is detected, the system automatically throttles CPU performance without interrupting active media playback or presentations. In addition, the “Adaptive Energy Saver” function also activates the energy-saving mode regardless of the battery status, provided the system load and usage scenario allow this.
Sam Singleton
In both cases, the NPU can ensure that AI-supported functions remain active in the background without negatively impacting the energy balance. The AI also balances priorities in the background, for example by delaying cloud synchronization or adaptive process rest.
HP Omnibook and other Copilot models in comparison
Devices such as the HP’s Omnibook X line already integrate these technologies system-wide. In combination with an Intel Core Ultra 7 258V and an Intel Arc 140V GPU, the NPU enables locally executed features such as Windows Studio Effects or AI functions in HP AI Companion without noticeably draining the battery. Many other models also achieve battery runtimes of over 24 hours in mixed operation thanks to the use of NPUs. Models such as the Surface Laptop 6 or the Surface Pro 10 integrate a dedicated NPU directly into the Intel Core Ultra SoC, supplemented by high-performance CPU cores and integrated graphics.
Other compatible devices also rely on the Copilot concept, which combines powerful NPUs with intelligent energy management. Devices such as the Galaxy Book with RTX 4050/4070 or the Surface Pro 10 with Intel Core Ultra 7 demonstrate these possibilities. In practice, this means that even when language translation, background blurring or real-time image optimization are actively used, power consumption remains low.
Software-based optimization and AI offloading
A significant contribution to energy savings is made by shifting compute-intensive workloads to the NPU on the software side. Applications such as Zoom, Adobe Premiere Pro or Amuse are increasingly using native ONNX runtime-based interfaces to offload AI processes such as image generation, object tracking or audio filters to the NPU.
Adobe
This reduces the energy requirements of the CPU, which is particularly noticeable during long periods of use in video conferences or creative applications. The NPU is accessed via standardized interfaces such as DirectML and Intel and AMD platforms, which have native integration into the ONNX runtime. The resulting reduction in load on the main processors makes a decisive contribution to more even load distribution and therefore longer battery life.
Interaction of CPU, GPU, and NPU in practice
In modern notebooks, the CPU, GPU, and NPU work as a dynamic processing trio. While the CPU continues to control the operating system and general applications, the GPU takes over graphics-intensive tasks or parallelized computing operations. The NPU concentrates on dedicated AI processes and enables continuous processing with low energy consumption. Windows 11 assigns these tasks specifically, and continuously evaluates which unit is most efficient for execution.
IDG / Mark Hachman
This means that recurring tasks such as speech transcription, person recognition, or background noise filters can be processed directly on the NPU. This not only lowers power consumption, but also reduces the system temperature, which enables lighter cooling systems and therefore more compact and lighter notebook designs overall.
Local processing instead of cloud offloading
The local execution of AI workloads on the NPU replaces the usual cloud access in many cases. This means that image analyses, language models, or layout suggestions no longer have to be calculated online, but run entirely on the device. This not only reduces latencies, but also avoids unnecessary network activity. This is another factor that reduces power consumption.
At the same time, the availability of these functions is increased even without a network connection, for example on the train or when travelling. Battery life then benefits in two ways: through lower computing load on the CPU and GPU and through reduced Wi-Fi or LTE/5G activity.
Windows 11 shows NPU utilization in Task Manager for the first time
Microsoft has expanded the Task Manager for control and transparency of this new architecture. In addition to CPU, GPU, and RAM, NPU utilization is now also displayed as a separate measured value. This allows users to understand how much their AI applications are actually benefiting from the dedicated hardware.
For developers, the ONNX runtime in combination with the Windows Performance Analyzer also offers detailed diagnostic functions that can be used to specifically analyze inference times, operator load, and load curves. This enables fine-tuned optimization for maximum energy gain and minimum runtime delay.
Sam Singleton
Battery life as the new benchmark for AI PCs
While attention has long focused on computing power and model size, there is now a paradigm shift. The actual runtime of a device is increasingly becoming the most important quality criterion for AI-optimized notebooks. Modern AI notebooks achieve video playback times of over 26 hours under realistic conditions, a value that would be almost impossible to realize without NPU-supported power distribution.
At the same time, the combination of an adaptive energy-saving mode, local AI offloading, and intelligent load controls opens up new possibilities for mobile applications where the power supply is not always guaranteed.
Conclusion: Saving energy with specialized AI hardware
The integration of NPUs into current notebook platforms not only marks a technological advance in terms of AI performance, but also enables a sustainable reduction in energy consumption through intelligent task sharing for the first time. In combination with the new energy-saving functions of Windows 11, the result is a platform that not only works faster in everyday use, but also noticeably more efficiently. For users, this means longer battery life, less waste heat, quieter systems, and an overall better balance between performance and mobility, without sacrificing modern AI functions.
Range anxiety may have just met its match. Mercedes-Benz has taken an EQS prototype fitted with a solid-state battery on a 749-mile run from Stuttgart to Malmö, and it still arrived with roughly 85 miles left in the pack. The achievement stands as one of the most impressive real-world demonstrations yet of what solid-state technology can deliver, hinting at a future where electric vehicles could rival or even surpass the convenience of gasoline-powered cars.
A Run to Prove the Point
The test wasn’t a carefully stage-managed loop; it was a cross-country trip through Germany and Denmark, guided by the brand’s Electric Intelligence navigation software, which factored in elevation changes, cabin climate control, and traffic. It was, in other words, a practical demonstration that makes today’s longest-range EVs look dated.
Mercedes CTO Markus Schäfer described the feat as “a true gamechanger for electric mobility,” framing it not as a lab experiment but a preview of what customers could expect within the next decade.
Unlike the lithium-ion pack in today’s EQS, this prototype used lithium-metal solid-state cells developed with Factorial Energy. The pack stores about 25% more energy without adding weight or bulk, and uses pneumatic actuators to maintain consistent pressure on the cells during charging cycles—boosting both safety and longevity.
It’s the kind of breakthrough that shows why Mercedes isn’t giving up on traditional engineering either. CEO Ola Källenius has already stressed that the V12 isn’t dead yet, promising it will remain in production “into the 2030s.” Solid-state batteries and twelve-cylinder engines might seem worlds apart, but Mercedes is clearly betting on range and emotion side by side.
A Broader Electric Push
The EQS test comes amid a larger EV shift. Mercedes is preparing to launch its first all-electric C-Class in 2026, promising nearly 500 miles of range and a glowing LED grille. At the same time, it’s reviving heritage products like the G-Class Cabriolet to keep loyalists engaged.
Together, the moves show a company trying to balance the demands of an EV-led future with the timeless appeal of its legacy icons.
Covering 749 miles on one charge isn’t just a headline—it’s a signal. Mercedes has shown that solid-state batteries can unlock range that rivals gasoline cars, while still keeping the brand’s heritage alive through models like the V12-powered flagships and G-Class derivatives.
Mercedes is proving that the road to tomorrow’s EVs doesn’t mean abandoning the values that built its past.
